ABSTRACT
For Goethe the year 1823 begins with a severe attack of pericarditis, his first serious illness for twenty years. He feels lost, and scoffs at the doctors: ‘You can try all your tricks but you will not save me!’ Then mystically he says: Tor three thousand years I have suffered under such a weight of illness.... ‘In the intervals he exults in the acuteness of his sense of taste, which has detected a slight trace of anise in his medicine. He learns with satisfaction that he is to be given arnica, and immediately proceeds to deliver a lecture on the flower, of which he had found splendid specimens in great profusion in Bohemia.
